Agent Orange is fortunately not yet out of options, but that dog-wagging one will be there until he’s out of office...
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has said that the temptation to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea 'is strong and the argument rational'.
He told a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that North Korea poses the most immediate threat to global security, arguing that denuclearization of the regime must be a 'fundamental' American foreign policy goal.
The veteran diplomat was speaking before North Korea warned that the U.S. is pushing the whole world towards a 'nuclear war' in its latest letter submitted to the UN. www.dailymail.co.uk/...
But now that the “general mentality” about stopping North Korea has changed under the Trump administration and there is a “greater willingness to support” the use of force even outside the government, would Kissinger himself now advocate such a course? He was asked at the Senate hearing whether we have reached that decisive “fork in the road,” given administration statements that we will not allow North Korea to possess nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang, Beijing, and Moscow may take great comfort at Kissinger’s public testimony, but, given his mastery of realpolitik, they would be imprudent to assume it is necessarily what he has advised President Donald Trump in private, or what the administration is considering on its own.
Kissinger responded that we are, or are about to be, at that point: “The temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack is strong and the argument is rational. But I have seen no public statement by any leading official…” He did not finish the sentence, which may or may not suggest that he was getting uncomfortably close to revealing internal administration deliberations.
He did, however, offer his own view, which differed somewhat from his 1994 statement on the use of pre-emptive force: “[M]y own thinking is, I would be very concerned by a unilateral American war on the borders of China and Russia in which we are not supported by a significant part of the world, at least of the Asian world.”
So, Kissinger finally has a presidential administration prepared to take the “strong, rational” action he says he once favored, and a public mood in which many former officials and military leaders now publicly advocate such a course — and Kissinger has moved the goal posts. The zeitgeist must now include not only American popular and elite opinion, but also Chinese and Russian buy-in — which would give them the same veto power they have been wielding to protect North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. It is a prescription for continuing the very policy paralysis Kissinger has been decrying for three decades.
